


I'll Bless My Homeland

by lmc291



Series: it's not sedition if you win [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: BAMF Kushina, BAMF Mikoto, Bechdel Test Pass, Canon I love canon I love to wave at it as it passes by, Danzo is a grade A jackass, F/F, F/M, Fall of Uzushiogakure, Mikoto Has The Mangekyo Sharingan, Timeline What Timeline, Women Being Awesome, and you will pry that headcanon out of my cold dead hands, i have a thing for the anastasia broadway cast recording, in this house we play fast and loose with canon, second war, world building
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-14
Updated: 2019-08-14
Packaged: 2020-09-01 00:14:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20248984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lmc291/pseuds/lmc291
Summary: Let me have a moment/ Let me say goodbye/ To bridge and river, forest and waterfall/ Orchard, sea and sky/ Harsh, and sweet, and bitter to leave it all/ I'll bless my homeland ‘til I dieThough the scars remain and/ tears will never dry/ I’ll bless my homeland ‘til I die





	I'll Bless My Homeland

**Author's Note:**

> In which the Anastasia Broadway cast recording gives me Fall of Uzushiogakure feels.
> 
> Author is willfully ignoring the vague canon timeline.

Kushina lets just enough chakra run through her veins to rustle her hair. It’s not enough to convey an intent to harm the Hokage, but his guards tense minutely anyway. “This was a courtesy meeting. You won’t stop me.”

Sarutobi narrows his eyes at her while old Shimura hisses at her disrespect. “If we’re letting our jinchuuriki out of the village, it will be to deploy to the front lines and not for some jaunt to a pile of rubble,” the councilman decrees.

“Your opinion wasn’t asked for,” Kushina snaps at him. How dare he? She’s never felt more powerful-- more in control-- in her entire life as she does right then, standing before the Hokage and his advisors in her traditional Uzumaki battle regalia instead of her chuunin uniform. She’s there not as a shinobi of the Leaf, but as the last living member of Uzushio’s ruling family. She knows she cuts an impressive figure in it. “Konoha failed in her treaty obligations to Uzushio. When Uzushio was desperate for aid, her call went unanswered. Consider yourself lucky that I don’t answer that cowardly insult accordingly.”

The Hokage continues to study her with a hard jaw, but a hint of sorrow in his eyes. After a few agonizing minutes of silence, he acceeds to her. “Name your team.” Shimura sputters in indignation.

Her answer is prompt. “Uchiha Mikoto, Namikaze Minato, Nara Shikaku.” She trusts each of them with her life, and even more than that, the secrets of her homeland. None of them are critical to the war effort aside from being four warm bodies, and Shikaku is the heir to a noble clan-- not even Shimura would risk his life unnecessarily by sending him to the front to spite her mission request. 

Sarutobi makes a motion to a chuunin aide that she doesn’t recognize and the other woman flickers out of the room. 

When her friends enter with their mission gear twenty minutes later, they don’t gape at her… well, they don’t gape much. Minato is the only one who has to physically shut his jaw though. Shikaku’s eyes widen marginally, and Mikoto’s grin is sharp enough to kill a man. She knows what an important statement wardrobe can make. One glance is all she needs to understand Kushina’s intent, and it’s neither the first nor the last time Kushina is grateful for her best friend.

Shikaku is the first to speak. “Uzushiogakure.” It’s not a question.

Kushina nods and begins her briefing. “Our primary objectives are inspection and retrieval. If possible, we are to determine how Hidden Mist was capable of breaching the barrier seals faster than reinforcements could arrive.”

Her companions nod sharply, understanding the implications of such a massive security breach. “If such a thing can be replicated here, it could wipe us out.” Mikoto observes. 

“The civilian population would be particularly vulnerable.” Minato states the obvious, and Kushina tries hard to ignore the pang of grief that accompanies thoughts of her siblings-- of her baby sister too young to stand a chance, or her big brother who probably died in a desperate effort to save whoever he could, and the sisters spread out in age between them… 

“You have two weeks.” They all nod at the Hokage. “That’s the longest I can spare you for.”

“So that gives us about seven days on the island.”

Kushina does some quick math in her head to check Shikaku’s assessment. It should take three days to get to the coast, maybe four if they need to be extra stealthy. Yes, a week on Uzushio sounds right. Any time she can grasp to say goodbye to her home-- her family, her people, her culture-- is precious.

“Seven days seems rather excessive. Shinobi of your caliber should be able to quite quickly locate whatever relics might still be there. There’s no need for… sentimentality.”

All oxygen seems to leave the room at Shimura’s comment. She thinks she can hear Minato’s teeth grinding together.

Sarutobi slides a look to his advisor. “Two weeks,” he reiterates.

They take the dismissal for what it is and salute the Hokage before exiting the room.

Kushina lets her companions leave ahead of her and levels Shimura one last, long stare for daring to suggest she had no right to lay Uzushio’s spirits to rest.

'I should eat him.'

'I’m sure he doesn’t taste good', she thinks back at the Nine-Tails.

'He’s vile.'

She shrugs mentally. 'Can’t do much about that.'

Kurama is… well, he’s a grumpy son of a bitch, but they have a tentative accord. She doesn’t like enslaving him any more than he likes being sealed inside her, but she didn’t dare be disobedient to one of the Five Great Nations and destroy her family’s long standing alliance. Kurama, for his part, didn’t much fancy the effort needed to reconstitute himself if she was killed while hosting him. (And killed she would be if she dared approach anything that could be remotely construed as disloyal. She has the ability to level the village. They won’t risk that.) He’s an ass, but he’s a lazy one. They talk, at least, and he can snark with the best of them, which she finds hilarious. 

They’re well outside the village walls before Minato asks if she’s okay. “Councilman Shimura’s an ass.”

She feels her lip curl as they race through the trees. For the second time that day, she says, “I can’t really do anything about that.”

Minato knows how she feels. He was there with her the night she found out. He was there as she screamed and raged and sobbed uncontrollably into his lap, strong and steady in the face of her maelstrom. Honestly-- best boyfriend ever. 

He doesn’t shoot a look of pity her way because he knows she wants no pity, but the look he gives her lets her know that he has her back for whatever she needs. When he reaches over to briefly brush her pinky with his, she gets a warm feeling in her belly.

They don’t stop to rest until the sun is low in the sky. Mikoto casts the fire they decide to risk-- they’re still deep within their borders so for the moment, it’s safe. Around mouthfuls of rations they work out the watch rotations for the night. Kushina gets bullied into taking last watch, and she knows they just want to look out for her. Shikaku levels her a spectacularly unimpressed look when she tries to insist that the team captain should take the shit middle watch and promptly volunteers for the shit middle watch himself.

She blinks at him and then decides if he’s going to be stubborn about it, she might as well just go to sleep.

So she does.

***

They make it to the shores of the mainland in three days. 

Kushina kneels at the edge of the shoreline, fingertips spread on the ground to feel the remnants of the seal matrix. It was shattered. “How did they do this?” she murmurs to herself. She funnels a trickle of chakra into it to call up a visualization for her companions to observe. Mikoto activates her sharingan to observe the fluctuating energy and Minato walks up and pokes the nearest barrier fragment. Because of course he does. (She smothers a snort.)

Mikoto doesn’t ever talk about how her sharingan is different-- how the black bits are blade-like instead of the typical commas. Mikoto doesn’t talk, and Kushina never asks. It’s a rare secret that stands between them, but there are some things you don’t tell outsiders, even if they are your best friend. Kushina herself sits on a mountain of fuinjutsu secrets that have the distinct possibility of dying with her. But Mikoto can do things. She can call black flames that burn everything in their path that don’t go out until she cancels the jutsu and no one has ever escaped from one of her special genjutsu fully sane. 

Kushina chooses not to dwell on the fact that Mikoto only uses those jutsu when she’s with one of the four of them and decides that it’s unspoken weird clan politics that convinced them to keep from disclosing anything about it in their mission reports. Shikaku certainly understands clan secrets, and Minato’s enough of a genius to know when to keep his mouth shut. She may not be a genius herself, but Kushina is at her heart a very loyal friend.

Mikoto’s eyes narrow in concentration. “The chakra remnants are...strange.” She walks up closer to the barrier, head moving as she takes in how what’s in front of her face is different from what’s out over the water. Minato nods, agreeing with her. 

Kushina glances over at Shikaku, who prods it with his shadow. He may not be a sensor-type, but his kagemane no jutsu is just sentient enough to get a feel for chakra networks. “Whatever it was, it’s powerful. The oldest seals-- they’re blood wards right?”

She nods slowly, wondering how Shikaku can tell that, or if there’s intel somewhere about the ancient and bygone practice of using sacrifices to anchor the strongest protection seals. “Sacrificial wards fell out of fashion generations ago. But, yes, some of the oldest wards are blood-based.”

Minato flexes his fingers and Kushina can’t tell if it’s the tic he gets when he’s analyzing something particularly challenging or if he objects to one of the old practices of her culture.

In the back of her head, Kurama lets out a distressed whine. He recognizes the chakra. 'Isobu.'

Kushina reels back, shocked. 'The Three-Tails?' But looking closer at the shattered barrier she realizes that only a tailed beast could produce that sort of damage.

“The Three-Tails did this,” she announces, distressed. In all of Uzushio’s legends, Isobu was their friend long before Senju Hashirama sold him to Hidden Mist. What could they have done to him to turn him like that?

Her companions all shoot looks at each other. 

“If they bring their jinchuuriki--”

“No way they’ll make it that far into Fire Country--”

“Like fucking hell we’ll just let--”

They’re all talking over each other, arguing about whether or not they’ll just let the Elders order her to defend the village in single combat against Mist’s jinchuuriki.

She whistles loudly. “Enough.”

They stop.

“That’s a problem for another day. What we know right now is that the Three-Tails is strong enough to destroy Uzushio’s seals.” She stands. “We need to finish what we came here to do and then get the hell home and report this to the Hokage. Come on-- if we push it, we can get to the island in an hour.”

***

There are bodies. 

There are still bodies. 

Kushina thinks she may have blacked out from rage, because one moment she’s staring at the corpse of a toddler, and the next she’s suddenly pressed up into a wall a block away and blinking into Mikoto’s red eyes. Over Mikoto’s shoulder, she can see Minato coiled like a spring and holding a paper tag, while Shikaku is kneeling beside him with his hands in the rat seal, a single bead of sweat betraying his nerves.

That’s when she realizes she can’t move anything but her eyes. In the small way that she can, she takes stock of herself. She can just barely see that her fingernails have elongated and she has a suspicion that her pupils might have become slits. Too close. She can’t lose control like that-- not so close to her remaining precious people.

“Are you good?” Mikoto asks quietly, as if her forearm isn’t pressed against Kushina’s throat and she’s not holding a kunai against her femoral artery with her other hand.

Kushina takes a shaky breath, thankful that Shikaku has allowed her enough movement for that. “Yes.”

Mikoto eases back, and the others stand down at her signal. She lay a gentle hand on Kushina’s shoulder. “Let’s take a walk, yeah?”

Kushina nods a few times in quick succession. “I know a place we can go.”

She leads them to a small bridge, tucked away over one of the smaller side canals, its secluded nature protecting it from the onslaught. Minato and Shikaku take up a security perimeter just in case, but keep out of earshot to give them privacy.

Kushina watches as her friend allows herself to pace. She hasn’t seen Mikoto this agitated-- this scared-- since she got her special sharingan.

Mikoto stops pacing and spins to face Kushina. “Promise me you’ll be careful. Promise me you won’t do anything rash.”

“Be careful? Why--?”

“Kushina,” Mikoto interrupts with a hiss. “There’s no treaty anymore.”

“Of course there isn’t a treaty!” she snaps. “They’re all dead.” There’s no treaty. She pauses, following that thought. They’re all dead. There’s no one left on Uzushio with political clout (no one left, period) to care about her continued well-being. She feels a chill of dread creep down her spine as her breath catches in her throat. 

Kushina always knew she was a political pawn. It wasn’t something that was ever spelled out so explicitly, and Auntie Mito never framed it that way, but that’s what they both were. Mito arranged her own marriage in order to end a war and to ensure protection for their tiny nation. Kushina was just another way to secure the alliance for another generation-- a girl of Mito’s bloodline to host the Kyuubi no Kitsune. But just because her chakra is best suited to host a legendary demon doesn’t mean it’s the only type that can. With the right seal, anyone can be a jinchuuriki. 

She’s disposable. 

She looks at Mikoto in dawning horror, and her friend nods at the conclusion she’s just drawn. Mikoto is smart and she can see the patterns and the shifting winds long before anyone else can. It was a talent she had long before she awoke her sharingan.

The situation isn’t pretty. Kushina had protection, security in the knowledge that if any harm came to her while within Konoha that her father-- her people-- would not rest until she was avenged. With all of them gone, she’s now shackled to obedience. There could be no telling what a village that abandoned their allies would do if she stepped a toe out of line. 

Or worse, she thinks as the hysteria starts to bubble up, they could try to breed her. It’s very likely that she’s the last Uzumaki. Anyone would could control the vitality of her bloodline would be well advantaged indeed. 

Kurama’s growls in the back of her mind shake her out of it. 'Let them try. Let them try, and they will rue the day they dared to think to cross me.'

She takes a breath to steady herself. 'I won’t give them a reason to.'

'They may not need a reason to.'

Kushina refuses to think about that. Konoha is her home now. She has protected it and it has protected her. She can trust her comrades.

Kurama snorts. 'If they seal me into some snivelingly obedient puppet-pawn because of you, you won’t even make it to the afterlife after I’m finished with you.'

She feels a small laugh bubble up past her lips, and Mikoto looks confused at her apparent mood change. She taps her temple as an explanation. “Bad joke.”

“I won’t lose my best friend because of some half-baked revenge plot,” Mikoto insists. 

“What about a fully baked one?” Kushina wisecracks.

Mikoto levels a glare at her but neither of them can contain the good humor that comes over them. 

Kushina controls her giggles and leans over to press a kiss to Mikoto’s cheek. “Love you, Mi-chan.”

A faint blush tinges Mikoto’s face as she waves Kushina off. “If Minato sees you doing that, he might challenge me to a duel. I’d hate to have to beat up your boyfriend.”

Kushina winks. “He’d make you work for it.” She pushes herself off the bridge railing. “Come on-- there’s work to do.”

It takes them two days to bury the remainder of the dead that they could find. Kushina has a very large bone to pick with the Sandaime. Her kinsmen should have been laid to rest. She doesn’t expect it to be through their own rites, but two Konoha platoons did make it to Uzushio. They should have cleaned up all of their fallen comrades. They should still be here. She knows some work was done. She knows the population count of her homeland and she knows that the number of people they’ve found don’t come near that. Why wasn’t the job finished?

They spend those two days at their base in her father’s office in the administration building. She’s not ready to see what became of her childhood home, and the admin building is the most central. Together, they carefully pick apart the security seals protecting the underground grotto beneath the archives that held Uzushio’s most precious and most secret scrolls.

Her friends accept them solemnly as she divvies them up among them. “These are now officially Uzumaki clan secrets. I’m trusting you to keep them safe until we return to Konoha.”

Shikaku is the one who surprises her with his response. He bows more deeply and more gracefully than she ever thought was possible. “The Nara are honored to protect the Uzumaki and their Legacy. The Uzumaki can always count on the Nara in times of need.”

Kushina thinks she could have heard a pin drop. This is a formal declaration of clan allyship, and her heart swells even as she struggles to remember the response she never thought she’d be in a position to say. “The Uzumaki thank the Nara,” her voice barely wobbles, “and vow from this day forward to return honor with honor, good faith with good faith, and friendship with friendship. Let it be known that in times of need, the Nara can rely on the Uzumaki.” She returns her friend’s bow. The words aren’t right, but they come from her heart.

They both straighten back up, and Minato takes her hand. “I can’t promise anything as fancy as that. But we’ve been watching each other’s backs for awhile, and I promise you that I’ll protect these just as hard.” She swallows hard when he kisses her fingertips. 

Mikoto coughs delicately to pull their thoughts away from each other. “You know I can’t promise you an alliance.”

Yet, Kushina thinks, as she sees a vision of Mikoto ruling the Uchiha with the sharp efficiency of a hospital scalpel.

Mikoto’s lip twitches like she can tell what Kushina is thinking. “But anyone who tries to harm you, whether to get to these or otherwise, will wish they’d never been born.”

Kushina is almost completely overcome by emotion and she swipes at her eyes. A tear escapes, then two, then three. “You guys,” she sniffs, “are the best friends I could ever ask for.” And all of a sudden she’s bawling in the middle of her father’s office and being pulled into the best group hug.

***

Kushina doesn’t think she can step one foot into her childhood home. She’s stuck-- frozen in front of the threshold, terrified by what might await her inside. She knows it’ll be empty. Her family would have tried to evacuate. Several of her siblings were too young to fight, so Mom would have done her damndest to get them off the island. (It’s been long enough that she knows they didn’t make it.)

Dad… Dad would have gone down defending his people with his last breath. Dad and Ichiro-ji and Shou and Hana and the rest of her father’s guard whom she considered as close as family… 

Minato walks up so he’s standing next to her. He reaches out to squeeze her hand and then slowly brings it up to press a kiss to the back of it. To hell with avoiding public displays of affection while on-mission. She needs the comfort and emotional support of that small physical contact. 

“We’re right here with you,” he murmurs to her. 

Kushina takes a deep breath and slashes a kunai across her palm. She presses her bloody handprint to the tile on the doorframe with a decorative whale on it and feels chakra hum as the barrier seal releases. Apparently there was enough time to seal the house against enemies. 

She crosses the threshold, friends at her back. 

Kushina was right-- the house is empty. Eerily empty. It’s strange, she thinks, setting foot inside a place she hasn’t seen in ten years. Since entering in service to the Leaf, her time is no longer her own. She can’t just leave to visit her family. 

There’s no evidence of what she assumes must have been the frantic rush to escape, but there are still dishes in the sink, and coloring books on the kitchen table. It looks as if her mother did something just as benign as running a quick errand to the grocery store. 

Her old bedroom isn’t the same. Her parents had more children and needed the space, but it’s still a little girls’ room and some of the decorations are familiar. The others are quiet as she brushes a loving hand over the stuffed animals on the beds and the pictures tacked to the walls.

She spends a bit more time in her parents’ room-- sealing away a few mementoes like some of her mother’s jewelry and her father’s favorite pair of novelty socks. There’s a hidden room that houses the clan records and one by one she carefully seals them away, too.

It’s late afternoon by the time she’s finished, but the sun is high enough in the sky that she decides, “Alright. Let’s get back to the mainland while there’s still light. Let’s try and get back ahead of schedule.”

Kushina almost doesn’t look back at the island when they leave. She doesn’t think she ever wants that one last look-- just wants to remember Uzushio in its prime and not as a pile of ruins.

She turns around anyway. She owes it to her people to remember what happened. (She’ll never forget and these hurts will never heal.)

With one final nod at the spiral over the gates, she gives the signal to move out.

***

Kurama’s warning rumbles in the back of her head. “Incoming!” She calls out. “Five kilometers east.”

“We’re not along a patrol route,” Shikaku comments from his position. Their company won’t be friendly, then.

Mikoto blinks to reveal her activated sharingan and rolls her neck in anticipation. Minato twirls two common kunai in each hand. Kushina knows he’s not far enough along in recreating the Nidaime’s Flying Thunder God technique to use it in battle yet, but he’s still a terror on the field without it. “What sort of welcome should we give them, taicho?” he asks, and Kushina needs to suppress the rush of pleasure that comes from her boyfriend calling her captain. (She’ll dissect that later.)

She hopes it’s Hidden Mist, because she’s been itching for a fight since they first set foot onto Uzushio’s ruins. Her blood tends to run hot even without Kurama’s thirst for vengeance, and right now-- with her grief still painfully sharp? She just wants to beat someone to a bloody pulp. She's not known as the Red Hot Habanero of Konoha in the Bingo Book for nothing.

The skirmish is as quick as it is violent and the Mist nin don’t stand a chance. Before they even realize they’re dead, Shikaku and Kushina are ripping them apart with shadows and chakra chains, Minato is tearing out throats almost as fast as a blink, and every eye Mikoto meets gets caught in a brain-liquifying nightmare. When it’s over, they stand over the bodies of their enemies, catching their breath and covered in blood and viscera. 

Kushina has never felt more alive. The longevity of her people keeps her from panting like the rest of her team, but she feels a satisfied energy that she imagines is an equivalent feeling. She catches Minato’s hungry gaze and suddenly realizes that if they were alone, he’d be pressing her up against the nearest tree. She kind of wishes they were alone. 

“Is everyone alright?” she asks. Her friends murmur their assent as she conjures up a water jutsu so they can at least clean up their faces and hands. 

Mikoto nods to one of the bodies because she’s too dignified to nudge it with her foot. “Shall we dispose of them?”

Shikaku peers intently at the one closest to him. “This one has a bounty. I recognize him from the Bingo Book.”

“We’ll seal them up and bring them back home with us,” Minato says decisively, then shoots her an apologetic look while running a sheepish hand through his hair.

Kushina snorts and rolls her eyes at him. Honestly, how can you possibly forget who the team captain is? They all pool their body sealing scrolls together and make quick work cleaning up the clearing. She gives the order to leave the evidence of the bloody skirmish alone. She wants to leave a message for when Mist comes looking for their missing comrades. Of course the Sandaime wanted the whole operation to be conducted with stealth, but she was confident that he wouldn’t begrudge an opportunity to confirm Konoha’s dominance in the region. She has no plans to ask for forgiveness. 

She tallies up the likely bounties they can collect and thinks that once they split it, they'll have all earned the equivalent of a B-rank mission out of this excursion.

"Dinner on me when we get home," she announces.

Mikoto and Minato bump fists and Shikaku rolls his eyes at their antics.

"Let's go," he says. "We should report this in at Border Station Delta. They should know about this."

Shikaku is right. If their squad wasn't in the area, there's no telling how far into Fire Country Mist would have gotten. They'll have to shift around the patrol routes to make sure this security hole isn't discovered again.

"Yeah," she agrees. "Let's go home."


End file.
